


Survivor's Pain

by kayeherl



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky knows something has been done to him, Bucky's messed up, Howling Commandos - Freeform, Hurt and Comfort (ish?), It's all angst and no fluff, It's not a happy ending, M/M, Post-Bucky getting captured by Hydra the first time, Steve thinks Bucky's dead, This hurts, WWII fic, but he really isn't, sort of character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 13:44:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9184081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayeherl/pseuds/kayeherl
Summary: They said that war was glorious, that it would have boys returning as men and that they would be congratulated by everyone they knew. They were wrong. War turned James Buchanan Barnes into a monster, unworthy of Steve Rogers.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is not happy at all. Just a warning. If you want fluff and happy endings, this is not the fic for you TURN BACK BRAVE READER! This is a dark look into Bucky's mind during the war and it's essentially about losing humanity and finding it again in Steve. 
> 
> Anyhow, enjoy as much as you can. 
> 
> Kirk out

00800

 

They said that war was glorious, that it would have boys returning as men and that they would be congratulated by everyone they knew. They were wrong. War was ugly, men returned half themselves and boys didn’t return at all, and people only gave you sad looks if they even bothered to look at all. 

 

James Buchanan Barnes knew this, because he’d been back to Brooklyn, but that was a long time ago. He’d forgotten what it smelled like, because all he knew was the smell of war. War was gunpowder and blood and bile, and the smell of someone dead after a few days, that sickly sweet that never really stopped cloying the back of his throat. 

 

War was listening to the soft sounds of some seventeen-year-old crying after their first kill at night when they thought everyone else was asleep, and then the silence as he realized that they hadn’t come back the next. War was accepting that his boots were soaked through with blood even though leather was supposed to repel that kind of shit, wasn’t it? War was closing eyes upon eyes of even enemy soldiers when you didn’t have time to move the bodies, and never time to dig graves because they were  _ always marching _ through the mud and tripping on their fallen enemies like that should’ve been a normal thing. Cold bodies felt different than warm ones.  

 

War was listening to your commander because  _ that’s an order, Sarge _ and even though some of the orders were harder to swallow than the weeks-old bread they had while on rations and marching. Bucky always considered just waiting for the time when they’d stop marching and get real food to eat, but the few times he tried, he passed out and Jones was shaking his shoulder, telling him  _ you need to get up, Sarge.  _ Sometimes he was the one crying silently at night, and he’d gotten good enough at it that he was positive no one else heard. 

 

War was the cold nothingness Bucky felt whenever he pulled the trigger,  _ thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine _ and it was surprising how quickly they just became numbers, conquests. The clean kills were so easy to catalogue into neat little compartments in his brain, numbers and places, because he could look away from the spread of blood across the front of a shirt or the back of a head. From a thousand yards away, he couldn’t see the light leave their eyes unless he still had his eye to the scope. He could never quite manage it.  _ You’re the best sniper we’ve had in years,  _ the higher-ups would tell him, his Captains and Colonels and Majors with a pat on the back that was a touch too hard. 

 

War was sticking his chin out and acting proud when he received his new ranks, the praise, the metals, smiling when the camera flashed, and no one would ever see his picture anywhere because they were just doing that part to save face. Someone like him--someone out doing daring, reckless things on the front lines--wasn’t meant to last long anyways.

 

War was getting captured-- _ because it was bound to happen sometime because luck wasn’t in Bucky’s name anywhere he looked-- _ and going quietly because you had to learn how to recognize a situation that was impossible to get out of. It was sharing your rations with the others in your cell and learning their names  and asking about their sweethearts back home and trying to feel something other than dead when they pulled out a picture so that maybe you’d be friendly enough by the end of the day to not feel awkward about asking them to lend their body heat so neither of you would freeze to death. 

 

War was stepping in front of the kid who always looked terrified, hands shaking and breath coming in shallow gasps that sounded damn near asthmatic--and Bucky should know--when the soldiers came to take one of their own again and again and again. War was putting yourself in his place so that he wouldn’t be the one to not come back ever again, you would, and even though it made your heart pound in your chest, you didn’t flinch at all. Bucky Barnes wasn’t a brave man, but he could put on a good face, and he didn’t flinch when the guard took him down a hall he’d never been and strapped him down on a table that would become as good as home because he rarely left it. 

 

War was falling into the rhythm of not telling them anything. Questions spat in German would be answered with name, rank and number because that’s all Bucky was supposed to know, not anything else. They’d always told him that if he was captured, he’d be doing his country a disservice if he told anyone anything he wasn’t supposed to know. 

 

War was saying nothing despite the fact that they ripped and tore and did things to him that didn’t even make sense. It was keeping the screams tucked deep inside of him until he couldn’t anymore, until he was all screams and pain and nothing else, and then he would start babbling nonsense-- _ name, rank, number-- _ and then he realized it would be better to just scream, because he’d ended up telling them things otherwise. 

 

He told them things he’d never told anyone. 

 

War was accepting the fact that you’d tell someone your deepest, darkest secrets no matter what because ugliness tended to come out in ugly situations. They didn’t understand most of it anyway, all of them except for the scientist that came, and then he’d be even more scared because that’s when the needles came and they’d inject him with stuff that made everything in his body scream in pain. War was putting on a brave face no matter what because  _ you’ll get a medal for this, soldier.  _

 

War was realizing that he was the one who’d lasted the longest and that wasn’t a good thing. “You’re going good places, Mein Soldat,” the German scientist told him, and he didn’t believe it because no one could go good places strapped to a table with water dripping from the leak in the ceiling to the left of his ear. Sometimes he would feel the backsplash and it was cold. It wasn’t the only thing that was cold. When he wasn’t burning, it was cold, and Bucky wondered if choosing which was worse was part of war. 

 

War was hallucinations, because Bucky couldn’t have ever imagined Steven Grant Rogers looking down at him from a wholly healthy body that was muscled and solid, and  _ beautiful _ , and war didn’t have angels because death was ugly and cold and dark. 

 

“Bucky?” he asked like he was real and put a hand on Bucky’s chest. War was cruel, because Bucky would have never chosen to torture himself with this particular thing. “Bucky oh my god,” he continued as if he was real, and Bucky felt rage simmering in him. They couldn’t take this last thing away from him, because Steve was so far away from the hell of it all, he was home safe and possibly shivering between the covers of their bed that were worn thin and possibly not eating enough, but at least he was  _ safe _ from all of this. That was Bucky’s one consolation, and surely even they couldn’t be so cruel as to take that away from him. “It’s me,” the hallucination of some strange version of Steve that Bucky’s war-riddled mind had somehow made up said. “It’s Steve.”

 

And when Steve ripped the bindings on Bucky’s legs straight off, Bucky nearly cried past the smile he gave because it was really Steve, and somehow he’d found Bucky in this deep, dark hole and that wasn’t how Steve was supposed to see him. “Steve,” he said, and even though this was hell, Bucky was a selfish, selfish man because he smiled and felt so utterly  _ happy _ to see something familiar in this endless pain of war. 

 

Somehow he was sitting up and-- _ God what had they cut open and stitched back together wrong to make him feel so disjointed-- _ Steve was draping an arm around him. “Come on,” he said, and he was smiling like there was no tomorrow and his hand was almost too tight around Bucky’s shoulder. 

 

“Steve,” he said again, and this time he couldn’t quite manage to keep the smile on his face, because  _ what the hell was Steve, innocent, too-good-for-this-world Steve doing here of all places? _ He couldn’t protect Steve here. He looked up and down Steve, recognizable only be his eyes, because now Steve was big and he was strong, and maybe he didn’t need protecting because something had happened and suddenly Steve was capable of taking care of himself the way he thought he could when Bucky had found him nearly bleeding to death in an alley and one of Bucky’s classmates running away because they thought they’d done him in. 

 

“I thought you were dead,” Steve said, and the amount of pain behind those words made Bucky want to scream at Steve, because there wasn’t supposed to be the kind of emotion here when that kind of emotion could be stolen at any moment by the fickle whore called fate. 

 

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky said, instead of all of the other things he wanted to say about the pain he’d felt in his chest like his heart was giving out on him when Steve’s letters had stopped showing up and he’d wondered the same thing--if Steve’d kicked the bucket while Bucky was out at war. “What happened to you?” Steve didn’t comment on the fact that he had to take most of Bucky’s weight as they got up. 

 

“I joined the army,” Steve said, like it was a joke, but Bucky wanted to shake sense into him because that wasn’t something someone did. They got drafted. Only the idiots who believed them when they said that war was glory  _ joined _ the army, and Steve was smarter than that. Except he wasn’t, not in this case. Steve was stupid-stubborn sometimes, and he’d either been blind or had chosen not to notice the way Bucky’s eyes had been more and more haunted each time he came home. Of course, Bucky would never say that, so he simply followed it up with another quip because all he seemed to be good for when it really mattered was pushing people away. 

 

“Is it permanent?” he asked instead of saying everything that mattered. 

 

Steve glanced over at him, ever so briefly, a frown overtaking his face for the briefest moment, as if he could see the darkness that had consumed Bucky leaking out through all the edges that mattered. Then, everything started exploding, and Steve glanced away, arm still around Bucky and leading him to safety. “So far,” he said, and then they were done talking about anything really meaningful for a long time. 

 

00800

 

Bucky counted things when he thought too much, mostly because he couldn’t stand most of his thoughts. 

 

He counted the breaths that came from Steve’s nose, quiet and uninterrupted--foreign--as he stared at him. He’d been unable to sleep properly for weeks and so here he was, lying on the ground next to a stranger who knew everything about his best friend and very nearly looked like him, and he wondered if he should be out on lookout with Dugan and Morita instead. 

 

They’d found an abandoned sprawl of buildings a few miles from the blown up base, close enough to transport the wounded and see who would make it through the night. Captain America told them they’d be marching back to camp at dawn and that it would likely be a several-day march and that whoever couldn’t walk had to find some way to be carried and that wasn’t the man Bucky knew, because Steve didn’t know how to make orders like that. Steve had looked at Bucky and asked him if he was alright, and Bucky’d counted the number of freckles on his face and neck. Three, same as usual. 

 

Bucky shifted to a more comfortable position so that one of the sticks underneath him wasn’t digging into the space between two ribs-- _ how much weight had he lost? _ He hadn’t bothered to check, but his fatigues hung off him a bit more than they had before. He counted the drips of water coming from a leak in the roof and the light rain outside and decided he wanted to stay dry. It was nice to be able to decide that. 

 

Bucky Barnes wondered if he’d forgotten what it was like to be a free man, and then went back to counting Steve’s breaths before he could come to the conclusion. When he dared to look down from the ceiling, there was the gleam of Steve’s eyes, and no matter how different he looked, Steve’s eyes shining at him through the dark had never changed. He’d wake up sometimes back in Brooklyn to find Steve just looking at him and had never had the guts to ask why. 

 

“You can’t sleep.” It didn’t even have the good graces to be posed as a question. Bucky almost nodded, but the sudden howling rage inside of him caught him off guard, the kind that came right from that dark place where all of his deepest secrets, the darkness that was Bucky Barnes, resided. Steve didn’t know anything. He didn’t know what it was like to look face in the death daily and have that hanging over him. He didn’t know what it was like meticulously picking lives off, dozens at a time, without even being close enough to hear their last breaths. War was ugly and it made people ugly, and Steve didn’t realize that, Steve wasn’t supposed to be here to realize that, because the one thing Bucky had always been able to do was protect Steve, and now he’d even failed at that. Steve would see this ugliness up close and personal, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it because Steve outranked him--by some fluke of fate. 

 

So instead of snapping at Steve like he wanted, Bucky just shoved himself up, ignoring the way he felt different--had since he’d gotten off that table--and mumbled something to Steve about going outside to take a piss and went to count the stars because he couldn’t think about any of that for too long without feeling the suffocation of it all weighing down on his shoulders like the goddamn huge radio he’d sometimes hump when his time came around, on top of his sniper rifle, and everything else he had to carry. He wondered if it was possible to outweigh that with the responsibilities and then found one of the constellations he and Steve had named one evening when they were young, innocent, and so full of light that they burned brighter than any of the stars in the sky because they were next to each other, and nothing could make them any brighter than that. 

 

What had happened to those people? That question was lost in the hundreds when Bucky decided stars weren’t worth counting, and took his own heartbeat, over and over every minute. It was too slow, and he wondered if that’s why he was such a good sniper. 

 

On the march back, Bucky came to the realization that he wouldn’t be receiving any letters anymore; at least not on a regular basis. It was the kind of realization that made him miss a step, to fall a couple of feet behind Steve as they loped along at a pace that was just a touch too fast for Bucky, and it and it took Steve another two steps to notice that Bucky had stopped. He glanced back-- _ down _ \--at Bucky and a frown creased his forehead in the exact same place it always had. 

 

“Everything alright, Buck?” he asked like he had the right to. 

 

Those letters, the ones that came every few days from Steve and every few weeks from his sister Becca were like touchstones. They were reminders that a world outside of this war existed. They were what had kept Bucky from falling, of morphing into something that he would’ve punched straight out of Brooklyn before he got drafted because those kinds of  _ dangerous _ people didn’t belong anywhere near him and Steve. Every few weeks wouldn’t keep him from that, especially since he fell the call of it more and more since he’d been captured. It would be so easy to just give in and let that dark party of him, the ugly, brutish person residing in his body, taking over more and more each time they injected him, threw water over him so that he couldn’t breathe for minutes at a time, poked and prodded him, each time he killed someone else. When he let that dark part of him take control, he’d be the best damn sniper in the army. 

 

“Everything’s aces,” Bucky muttered and kept walking, because Steve wouldn’t understand. Steve didn’t understand anything about the darkness that tempted Bucky because he was too goddamn good. He was Captain fucking America after all, America’s  golden boy. 

 

The rage wouldn’t leave. It was present no matter what, spurring Bucky to walk faster, glare harder, snap at anyone who dared to stare at him long enough. He caught the furtive, questioning glances from the men he’d grown closest to. People didn’t make friends in war but Bucky needed someone, and his the men in his platoon were nice enough. He almost regretted getting close to them.  _ Almost. _

 

When he looked over at Steve next, Steve smiled at him, and for a moment, just a moment, the rage dissipated like thunderclouds over the sun, and Steve reached out. His hands still felt the same against his arm, big, bony and definitely not suited for war. For a moment,he could peer into Steve’s light without feeling filthy and far from worthy. For just one moment, Bucky felt like he could bask in that light and maybe, just maybe, find redemption, and even when Steve looked at Peggy Carter and she looked at him in a way that made Bucky’s stomach twist with an ugly, horrifying emotion that was probably jealousy. Even then, he managed to feel a glimmer of pride, because even though Steve didn’t understand the darkness of war, he and his blinding goodness had managed to do something better than anyone else could do. 

 

“Let’s give it up for Captain America,” he said and Steve took a moment away from staring at Peggy Carter like she was the best thing ever to give him a glance, a smile, and it hit him that Steve wasn’t his, not anymore, and then the rage came back. He left before Steve could see it to drown himself in a bottle or two.  

 

He wanted to hate Steve Rogers when he came and asked him to join him again. How could he, how  _ dare  _ he, if only he knew the things Bucky had gone through--

 

But he didn’t. Because Bucky would never tell. Never ever ever. He’d never tell anyone a thing.

 

Bucky Barnes could never hate Steve Rogers. He almost managed it. “Hell no,” he said, and Steve looked like a fucking kicked puppy, and before Bucky could shut his goddamn stupid mouth for once, and do the right thing, the thing that would keep him out of this goddamn trouble, he was saying, “That little guy from Brooklyn who didn’t know how to back down from a fight. I’m following him,” and it was almost worth it because when Steve smiled it was like looking into the sun. Bucky allowed himself to bask in the glow of it because he goddamn deserved that much, didn’t he?

 

No he really didn’t. But no one else had to know that, now did they? Bucky Barnes was good at pretending. Pretending he didn’t feel like something monstrous, pretending that he hadn’t held his breath when he’d awoken too many times to hear Steve shifting under the covers, breath coming in pants that he tried to keep quiet, but really couldn’t because Steve was absolute shit at keeping himself quiet. Pretending he didn’t envision Steve flushed with pleasure, hand around his own cock and saying quiet-like, “Bucky, Bucky, c’mere, kiss me.” Pretended he didn’t look at Steve different the next morning, pretended Steve didn’t notice. 

 

So he sat there, and he drank while Steve made the rounds, and he always came back to Bucky no matter who else caught his attention, and pretty soon it was just him and Steve, and Bucky couldn’t get drunk anymore, and neither could Steve, but they were both pretending, sitting there and pretending that it was two years earlier and they were just two stupid boys from Brooklyn. The turntable crooned out songs too soft for the harsh angles of what had happened, of what they were. Bucky wanted to smash it but couldn’t find a good place to start. The record, or the wood? He left it.

 

“Buck,” Steve said, quiet like they were ten again and trying to keep Steve’s Ma from realizing that they were still awake even though they’d been told to go to bed two hours ago and at least four times, and Bucky flinches. Steve doesn’t let him away, doesn’t let him slip back into the darkness he wants to recede into; away from those painfully bright childhood memories when they were both innocent and whole. He puts a hand on his shoulder and turns him so they can face each other. “Wanna dance?”

 

And that isn’t at all what he was expecting. Bucky sat there with no response, and counted the number of times Steve blinked as he waited for an answer (five) in a cold, calculated part of his brain before the rest of it caught up and his heart skipped a goddamn beat before tapping out a rhythm double-time. “Yeah,” he said, though he really just wanted to scream. “I’d like that.”

 

It was like falling back in time, if Bucky closed his eyes and blocked out the smells of the saloon--sharper than before, of course, because they really fucked him up--and if he could imagine that the hands against his back were smaller and placed lower. They don’t really know how to dance; Bucky’d tried to show Steve a thousand times but his coordination was absolute shit--the only fault Bucky could find in Steven Grant Rogers--and they ended up just doing this every time. One of them would pull the other closer into a hug and they’d just keep moving to the music, shuffling feet and obligatory swaying, but really just holding each other somewhere quiet, where nothing hurt and they didn’t have to worry. Steve’s head used to fit perfectly between the crook of Bucky’s neck and shoulder, and he would sometimes feel Steve’s lips through his shirt, mouthing things that he never had the goddamn guts to ask about. This time, it’s Bucky’s head who found its way to Steve’s shoulder, and he listened, eyes closed, to the steady-- _ foreign-- _ beating of a heart that has no problems at all. 

 

Bucky’s a monster for wanting that other beat, the one that could mean sudden death for when Steve’s heart just decided it didn’t want to keep the failing lungs working anymore and he didn’t even care. He was a monster. He wanted to cry, but figured it was pointless at this point. If he was going to cry he wouldn’t even be able to name what he was crying about. There’d be too many things at this point. They were quiet for three songs before Steve pulled back and Bucky felt like his heart was being torn out of his chest as the world came back to them, too bright, too vivid, too cold and angry. They weren’t in their shitty apartment back in Brooklyn where Bucky could crack the window and smoke Lucky’s while watching Steve draw by candlelight because their electricity had got shut off again when they’d failed to pay it in time.

 

But to his surprise Steve didn’t turn and go back to his seat, laughing it off as they used to. When Bucky looked up-- _ fucking up-- _ at Steve, his eyes were close and quiet, dampened by some sort of emotion that Bucky couldn’t fathom. 

 

“Bucky,” Steve said, and he didn’t have the goddamn right to sound that broken. Bucky wanted to pull away, to go somewhere where he couldn’t feel anymore because he’d let himself not for so long that it was more painful than torture to start again. Steve’s hands on his face wouldn’t let him. This was so far past the line that they carefully tiptoed around that Bucky couldn’t even think of a suitable reaction. He simply stood there, hands fisted in the material of Steve’s jacket and stared at him, blinded by how fucking  _ beautiful _ he was with his mouth just barely agape and eyes wide with wonder. 

 

Who the ever-loving fuck would’ve let someone so  _ good _ and  _ innocent _ and  _ pure _ into this brand of hell? Who would have the fucking balls to ask him to go there? Bucky would kill them, tear them apart joint by joint. 

 

Bucky was still thinking that when Steve kissed him, feather light and so brief that Bucky wondered if it’d been some mistake, but he followed those lips in his retreat, the fire in the deepest reaches of his soul suddenly flooding his body with desperate hunger, and he made a low, keening noise against Steve’s still, surprised lips as he pulled himself flush with an unfamiliar body attached to the essence of everything Bucky’d ever wanted. 

 

Steve wrapped his arms around Bucky a heartbeat later and opened his mouth to Bucky’s desperate, carnal ministrations, not hindering him in any way but not replying in kind. Bucky hadn’t expected him to, either. Steve was too good and pure for this primal drive, but Bucky  _ wanted. _

 

Bucky ate through Steve’s lips and teeth, endeavoring to become part of him, to crawl inside of him and live in his skin. Someone was making low, desperate noises and after a few moments, Bucky realized it was him. 

 

Steve rubbed a hand along Bucky’s back until it gentled his kisses, and then he opened up like a flower blooming, moving his lips along with Bucky’s, turning into Bucky’s body and melding himself to all the sharp edges Bucky wouldn’t have touched, exploring Bucky’s mouth with an aching gentleness, like he was making sure he wouldn’t break him. Bucky shuddered, the emotion welling up inside of him like a storm, and he was too much for his own skin suddenly. He pulled away and looked at Steve with his kiss-bruised mouth and flushed cheeks and fever bright  _ bright _ eyes. 

 

“Steve,” he whispered like he’d never seen him before. Like he was finding glass edges and shoving them together and they somehow made sense. 

 

“Yeah Buck,” Steve said, his hands somehow back on his face, stroking gentle patterns into his cheeks in the place of the tears Bucky couldn’t find. “I’ve got you.” He kissed him again, and this time there wasn’t a single mistake to be found in it.

 

They fucked against the bar, slow and hot, and Bucky didn’t break eye-contact with Steve from the moment he was inside of him, watching Steve come like a brilliant supernova and coming only moments later when Steve murmured his name and asked him to kiss him. 

 

In the morning, nothing had changed, and Bucky was still a monster and Steve was still the sun, and the only difference about war now was that Bucky understood why he felt that way about Steve. War was being selfishly glad that your  _ friendloverbrothercompletion  _ was there with you to die.

 

00800

 

War was cold and waiting for a train. It was waiting for the right moment, for the whiplash of freezing snow scissoring across your face, for Steve smiling at Bucky and asking him if he  _ remembered _ . It was feeling his hand gentle against his back for a few moments when the other men were occupied. 

 

They’d created something good here, the Howling Commandos. Bucky almost felt as if he’d made a difference. Helping Steve fulfill his good-hearted dreams of saving the world was like repentance. He’d never gone to church with Steve, but this must’ve been like what to go into confession and have all of the sins lifted from your shoulders. 

 

War was talking with Steve about plans to go back late into the night when everyone else was asleep and tracing patterns of nonsensical love onto bare skin. “We could buy a house,” Steve mused one night. “An actual house.” And Bucky’d laughed though it had hurt because he ached for something that normal. That was all he wanted. He kissed Steve and told him he’d buy him ten houses because they’d better pay them enough to be as rich as Howard Stark and the lies hurt so bad he wanted to tear them out of his skin. He didn’t close his eyes after that, head pillowed on Steve’s chest and listening to that strange heartbeat that was Steve and not Steve.

 

War was an empty gun and Steve tossing him another one--what would he do without him?--and the gut-wrenching sensation of being tossed out of a train. War was watching Steve--eyes wild and broken, and Steve shouldn’t look like that, not ever--hand outstretched and voice bordering on hysterical as he told Bucky to grab his hand. War was feeling his fingers slipping and nothing that the scientist did could stop a force of nature, a destiny that Bucky had seen ever since he’d been captured. 

 

They said war was glorious. They were dead fucking wrong. War was falling, and knowing full well that when you hit the bottom you wouldn’t be dead.

 

_finis_    



End file.
